Tuesday 25th June. Day 2 - Namawongo slum and Hands for Hope charity

An emotional and incredibly interesting day for myself, Bex and Karen.  We visited 'Hands for Hope' charity.  I found this charity when they contacted the Interface Uganda facebook page, asking for surgical and medical help for one of the children they have helped to educate.  When I looked at their website, I was motivated to sponsor a child to attend the school.  So being in Kampala, I could not resist visiting!  So this is me meeting Catherine and giving her the cards that my children made for her (plus a very small gift).

This is meeting Ryan - a child sponsored by another physio friend, Ann.  Her little boy (Jack) wrote him a lovely letter with a photo.

One of the classrooms.

Drumming and singing.

Catherine dancing!

Some of the donations for the school from our friends in the UK - they really appreciated it!  Their website is worth looking at:

www.ugandahandsforhope.org

They sponsor around 300 children from namawongo slum to go to school.  The staff there were brilliant.  

After showing us around the small school, we were taken into the slum for a walk around.  Whilst there, 

we met a mum with a small baby who had had a cleft lip and palate repair at CoRSU hospital last week -

by the surgeons who had been helped in their training by Interface!  We also saw where Catherine lived,

the indescribable poverty - a lot to take in and think about.  All quite overwhelming.

Crazy roads!  No rules at all.

Annette making juice from passion fruit.

Meanwhile, back at CoRSU, 5 surgeons (of which 2 were from Interface) and 3 medical students were in theatre doing 13 cases.  They had 3 theatres on the go all day.  This included several very complex cases.  Vikram also performed some hand anomaly surgery.

Vikram describes today as challenging, but marvellous.  Woan-Yi's description: 'It's so weird to be confronted with things in the developing world. There's some stuff you'd never see in the UK.  Some of the patients were so stoical.'